I’ve lost track of the count. While I’ve been making notes and thinking over the past two days, the only writing I’ve done (other than legal work) has been a couple scribbled notes. (I nearly wrote “a few,” but the truth is there are only two, one yesterday and one today. If I’m going to confess, I may as well be honest.)

At first, if I missed a day, I circled it on the calendar. Then, I found I was forgetting to cross off days, and I had to try to remember whether it was because I’d written and not noted it or if I’d simply not written. Either way, it wasn’t terrific. At this point, I could make a decent guess about how many days I’ve missed—ten, maybe. Not brilliant, but at least I’ve plodded along.

The upside is that by pushing myself in the past two months, I’ve made very good progress on the section of the book that really, really needed work—as in, it wasn’t there. All I had was a note that I had to add a climax and a conclusion. Those are pretty big things to need to add.

My problem was that I hadn’t figured out what they were going to be, apart from a vague notion about something at the very end. I’d also forgotten the most important thing about my process, which is that I write to discover the story. When I started following the characters instead of dictating to them, the final ascent to the climax began to unfold. (Yes, I’m mixing the hell out of my metaphors. Enjoy.)